


Knowing Yourself

by eggblue



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Angst, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-29
Updated: 2009-05-29
Packaged: 2017-10-30 20:18:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggblue/pseuds/eggblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You used the Bat because the Bat was free.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knowing Yourself

When you were young, nothing seemed strong. You would do what you had to. You would find strength in hustling money, because money was strength. You would find strength in friends, drag queens and street rats, because they were strong – because that’s what you were, only you didn’t see it. You would find strength in learning how to get yourself off, get yourself free, and you used the Bat because the Bat was free.

Once you knew yourself, no one could stop you. In the end, not even Bruce, or the Bat.

He would look for you, when he did not know he was doing so. He would look out onto the streets and he would have called your name but he did not know it. And he never would know it very well. Not in the way you needed.

Bruce was fickle, not strong like you. He would wear your death like a crown of thorns, but never understand it. It would be another excuse. In the end, you had never really want to take his offered hand. When he tried to make you safe and happy, you would take yourself in your hand and think of stronger things --

Heroes who never took off their masks because they never wore masks. Lonely girls who cared more about being free. Soldiers fighting on the streets for the dream of a home they never had.

The Bat was another vulture, feeding off the psyche of the streets. Not a Bat at all.

But they still hurt, those late summer days with Bruce, before everything finally did rot.

Those days burned him every day. Burned like the air in his lungs, when he’d wanted to keep Bruce deep in his throat until he was a part of him. Burned like the endless hours of fucking when they woke up from their after-patrol sleep, still tense and needy and nowhere near done.

The summer before the red, green, and yellow was a joke, was rotting clothes on a pedestal.

Before, you would show Bruce, take your sex in your hand and take in your sumptuous surroundings, thinking of stronger things. Bruce’s view of you was so narrow – Dick with an attitude, with stronger cred, with a hard cock.

Bruce’s great failure was his inability to distinguish one human being from the next.

You were part of the huddled masses, the people, the citizens, the city. Bruce never understood respect. He chose the institution over the individual. The symbol over the man. The role over the boy.

Look into the dark, he’d say. Look into the dark and tell me what you see.

You’d come at him from the dark, teeth gritted, hand smooth on your sex, gaze steady.

You’d come at him from the dark, but he would always back down from your challenge.

You would be free to move, and you would leave him, to make your own way in blood.

None of this -- now -- is about him. What strength does he have, against yours? What truth does he have, against yours? What hand of moral superiority can he raise against you, the boy who looked in the darkness and saw himself a killer? The boy who looked in the darkness and saw himself bound by no boots, no bats, no honor, no men?

 

The End


End file.
